Special Dead

by Patrick Freivald

  Her worry melted. “YOLO indeed.” How do you do that? She jerked her head at the security camera. “Mom’s already watching, you know that, yeah?”

  He lowered his hand to hers, lifted it to his mouth, and kissed it. “We’ve already YOLOed, I suppose.”

  “Do you think YOL-T’s really a possibility? For us?”

  “A second life? Why not?” He coughed. “That’s new.” He shook it off. “Anyway, why not? Your mom’s the smartest person in the world. She’ll cure—” His whole body jerked, and he stumbled back into the wall. “Uh, wow.”

  He grimaced, and she pulled out her phone, jamming the buttons with her thumb.

  He put his hand on his forehead and spasmed again. “Something’s wrong.” He cleared his throat and sank to his knees. His skin turned yellow, then gray. He gritted his teeth and slid to the floor, his palms pressed to his eyes. “Nnnngh.”

  “Sweetie?” her mom said through the phone.

  “Something’s wrong with Joe! Come fast!” She dropped the phone and fell to her knees in front of him. His skin writhed as his body vibrated like a speaker.

  “Ah!” He grabbed her hands, and his eyes flared with life they hadn’t held a moment before. “Ani....”

  “Hold on, Joe. Please.”

  He sighed, and his nose sloughed off his face, sprinkling down his shirt like dandruff.

  “Joe, no! I—”

  They locked eyes, and he went slack in her arms, his muscles turning to jelly and then dust.

  “—love you.”

  His skeleton crumbled, brittle pieces falling to the floor, and she wailed. She was still screaming when they found her, huddled in the powdered debris, clutching his empty shirt to her face.

  Chapter

  19

  Ani went through the motions of her Saturday routine, poked and prodded by Dr. Banerjee and her mother as if nothing had happened.

  Joe’s gone.

  Their clinical detachment made her want to scream, to lash out and crush them and hurt them and make them feel what she felt.

  Joe’s gone.

  She succumbed to the tissue samples, the questions, the mindless repetition.

  Joe’s gone.

  It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. He was in the lounge, playing with Kyle because nobody else wanted to. He was at home, not even a zombie, playing guitar and drawing and flirting with girls and picking a college.

  He’s dead.

  “Honey?” her mom said. Ani looked up. She’d crushed the steel bed frame in her hand, and her fingernails had gouged her palm. “We’re done. Why don’t you get dressed and head home? I’ll be right there.”

  The hand wasn’t hers; it belonged to someone else. Even so, she forced it to let go, nodded, and shuffled out of the room. She passed Kyle in the waiting room, and for once he had nothing to say. Putting one foot in front of the other was all she could manage. His red, droopy eyes followed her out.

  She was a hundred feet past Dr. Banerjee’s office when she heard his voice. “Ani? Can you come here, please?”

  She turned around. Dr. Banerjee’s white lab coat contrasted with his chocolate skin, framing his face against the sterile, hospital-bright walls. She shuffled back to him. He put his arm around her shoulder and led her into his office. He pulled out a chair, and she sat.

  He took a seat across from her and steepled his fingers. “I think it’s important that we talk about what happened yesterday.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Ani?”

  She almost heard her own murmur. “I don’t want to talk right now.”

  “I know.” He reached into a drawer, pulled out a syringe filled with green liquid, and set it on the table.

  She looked at it, then at him, and still didn’t speak.

  “Do you recognize this?”

  She dragged her eyes from the syringe to his. She nodded.

  “You took a sample of this and gave it to your mother, didn’t you?”

  She nodded again. It didn’t matter. He already knew. And so what? He wasn’t supposed to be doing...whatever that was anyway.

  “So you understand, then?”

  She didn’t. She shook her head. It hurt to pull pointless air into her pointless lungs. “Understand what?”

  “Why yesterday had to happen.”

  Confused, she looked at the syringe, then back at him. “Wait, what?”

  “Before you respond in a rash manner, please keep in mind that Mike and Lydia have both been treated and the compound can be activated at any time. If you attempt to harm me, it will be. Do you understand?”

  She realized that yes, she did. She understood perfectly the monster sitting in front of her. “You killed him.”

  He nodded. Hatred consumed her.

  She didn’t dare move as he explained. “I need your mother’s expertise to finalize my research, but I can’t have her looking into our side projects. They are not her concern, a cure is. This is what you need to know: if you behave, nothing will happen to your friends, and if she behaves, nothing will happen to you.”

  There was nothing to say. She thought about leaping across the table, tearing his head from his shoulders, gorging on his blood and his brains. She thought about Mike, disintegrating in her arms, all his stupid happiness crumbling away into dust as Joe had. Lydia’s smile hovered in front of her, all worry and panic and self-doubt fading into nothing. No second chance at life. No second chance at all.

  “Ani?”

  “I understand.”

  His executive smile split his face. “Excellent. It goes without saying that this stays between us. Nobody finds out. Otherwise I’ll be forced to take action.”

  She nodded.

  “Go home. You have homework to do.”

  She got up and walked out.

  She wandered the halls, unable to go outside for fear of a rogue zombie-hunter who didn’t get the memo, and unable to go home because Joe was dead and she’d never see him again. Her phone buzzed, and she ignored it. Mom could find her on the cameras, and she didn’t want to talk to anyone else.

  At four she found herself at the door of the lounge, watching Mike sit on the couch and smile at the black, lifeless TV. She stepped inside and sat next to him.

  “Hi, Mike.”

  He smiled and put his arm around her, pulling her close where she didn’t and couldn’t cry. She buried her face in his chest and told him the truth.

  “I’m so sorry. I loved you and I killed you and everyone’s dead because of me and I just want to go back to how it all was.”

  He patted her head. “It’s okay.”

  She looked up at him and saw a glimmer of comprehension, gone as soon as it came.

  “Are you in there, Mike? Do you know what happened? Can you ever forgive me?”

  He smiled. “Hi, Ani.”

  She settled back down. At some point the lights went off, sensitive to the lack of motion in the room. A long time later they came back on, and Ani looked at the door.

  Devon and Sam stood shoulder-to-shoulder, sad smiles on their faces. Devon wasn’t wearing her wig, and Sam’s hair was a mass of tangles. Both wore sweats.

  “Still trying to steal my boyfriend, Cutter?” Devon’s voice held no bite.

  “Something like that,” Ani said without moving. “You evil jock bitch.”

  Devon stepped into the room, and Mike looked up at her.

  “Hi, Devon.”

  “Hey, Mike.”

  “Want to play Jenga?”

  She looked at Ani, who nodded permission and sat up.

  “Why not?”

  Chapter

  20

  Lydia cried tearless sobs for three days straight, even after they went back to school. Ani spent most of that time trying to forgive her mom for the lie—the Phase VII cure was a disaster, and they had to go back to the drawing board with Phase VI. Banerjee murdered Joe. She seethed with powerless hatred every time she thought of him.

  Jeff Rock came out of h
is coma on Tuesday. In her selfish misery the news brought Ani no joy. For everyone else’s sake, she faked it. At least it snapped Lydia out of her depression. The fact that they were doing “cognitive testing” for “side effects from prolonged hypoxia” didn’t seem to make it through her skull, which suited Ani just fine.

  She got a pass to Mr. Murphy’s office for grief counseling, said she didn’t want to go, so Kyle took her place to get out of class. Mr. Giggles pouted around the room, not so much depressed as grumpy.

  “What’s his problem?” Devon asked, ignoring Miss Pulver’s admonishing look.

  Ani shrugged. Sam leaned forward and lowered her voice. “Principal Leoni’s leaning on him, hard. Kyle and Lydia are both failing Applied, and that’s unacceptable.”

  “Well, duh,” Devon said. “How tough is it to pass ’tard math?”

  Sam chuckled. “They’re not the ones in trouble.”

  Ani raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

  “Special Ed kids can’t get less than a ‘C.’”

  Devon glared at Sam. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Sam threw up her hands. “Special Ed kids can’t get less than a ‘C.’ What’s so hard to understand?”

  “What if they do?” Ani asked.

  Sam shook her head. “They don’t.”

  “Okay,” Ani said. “I get it. So what does that have to do with Grumpy Giggles over there?”

  “He won’t change their grades,” Sam said. “Said it’s against his principles.”

  Devon grunted. “I’ll bet paying his rent isn’t against his principles.”

  Ani grunted back at her. “That doesn’t make any sense. I wonder if Mom can do something about that.”

  Devon rolled her eyes. “What do you care? It’s not your grade.”

  She decided to change the subject. “Do either of you know the double-angle formula?”

  * * *

  By mid-week things were almost normal. At times, Ani could almost forget that there was one less chair in the room, and at other times she’d turn to say something to Joe and just stare at where he should be. He should be here. Not just in my heart. Not just my memory. Here.

  The flips from normal to hollow to rage and back were too much to handle, but she didn’t have a choice. She tucked the thoughts of murder away, hid them deep in her heart, buried them under concern for Mike, for Lydia, for her mother. That they raged back to the surface without warning every few hours wasn’t something she needed to talk to anyone about.

  Instead, she did her schoolwork; she did her chores, and she practiced her piano. In the meantime she managed to not murder anyone and counted that as a win. Thursday after school she had her second lesson.

  Mr. Herley criticized her for an hour straight. Too angry, too soft, too loud, too cheerful, nothing she did satisfied him, and he laughed at her original compositions.

  “What is this, blah blah blah? Have you no training whatsoever in music theory?”

  She scowled for the hundredth time, happy to have a target for her disgruntlement if not her rage. “Right. Not one minute. That’s why we’re paying you.”

  “Well,” he said, “let’s start with the scales and modes and see what you know.”

  He grilled her for another hour, snapping out commands that tested her dexterity and her knowledge, but in the end she didn’t learn much. As he packed his briefcase he smiled. “Don’t worry, next time will be harder.”

  “Thank you,” she said to his back as he shut the door.

  * * *

  Ani crumpled the paper into a ball and brushed it off her desk, where it joined a dozen just like it on the floor. Sonnets suck. The structure wasn’t a problem, but the content made her want to sob uncontrollably and curl into a fetal ball, which she couldn’t do.

  She rolled her eyes toward the door as Mr. Benson entered, the scowl on his face matched by Principal Leoni’s.

  He barked his drill-sergeant’s bark. “Alright, kids, line up!”

  They looked at each other, stood, and got in a line. A pair of soldiers shackled them together, just like at the end of every day.

  “Are we going home early?” Kyle asked.

  By way of answer, the soldiers produced seven pairs of handcuffs and, one by one, cuffed their wrists behind their backs. Kyle, already restrained from his chain implants, wracked his shoulder blades back to accommodate the new restraint.

  “What gives?” Devon asked.

  Mr. Benson hid a sidelong look at Principal Leoni. “It’s temporary. Just stay quiet and do as you’re told, please.”

  “Hi,” Mike said.

  Once secured, they shuffled into the hallway, where Mr. Benson stopped them. For once he spoke at a normal volume, his distaste palatable. “All right, kids, just stand there. Don’t move, don’t moan, don’t twitch. Just do exactly nothing.”

  Used to solitude and silence, they waited as the guards fidgeted and Principal Leoni walked to the end of the hall to make a call. Mr. Benson said a few words to Mr. Clark, then went back into the Special Dead room. At least they’re not planning on burning us. A moment later a janitor rounded the corner with a vacuum, his dark glare not leaving the floor.

  A brunette in her mid-twenties rounded the corner, leading a small child by the hand—he couldn’t have been more than six, and he stared at the line of chained zombies with wide blue eyes that held more curiosity than fear. Behind them marched a line of sixteen children, as young or younger than the boy.

  The teacher led them so that they stood immediately across from the Special Dead.

  “Take two steps forward, kids, but don’t touch.”

  Mr. Benson’s gaze hardened.

  The kids stepped forward to within inches of the line of chained zombies. Flecks sprang from them, tiny bits of debris flying from their heads and clothes. What the hell?

  Mike laughed at the spectacle, spooking a little redheaded girl, who started to cry. The teacher grabbed her hand and soothed her with unintelligible coos while Ani tried to figure out just what was going on.

  Devon gaped in disgusted astonishment. “Lice.”

  Oh, gross.

  Devon was right. The debris were tiny white, yellow, and brown insects, scrambling to escape the vicinity of the walking dead. As they skittered across the floor in blind, animalistic panic, the janitor triggered the vacuum and sucked them up.

  Sam scoffed. “Are you serious, Nick?” Mr. Leoni frowned at her. “Mr. Salter will have your ass in a sling faster than you can spit. And that’s if Ani’s mom doesn’t eat you alive.”

  He puffed up his chest. “I have the full support of the school board.”

  Sam lunged at a little boy, who fell back onto his bottom. Tears sprang to his eyes even as Mr. Benson choked up his pistol and pointed it at Sam’s head. Lydia squeaked.

  “Not funny, Miss Kickbush,” Mr. Benson said.

  Sam stepped back. Benson dropped the gun to his side, but his gaze didn’t falter. “Unless you want to end up like Mr. Lee,” he nodded at Kyle, “you won’t do that again.”

  Sam dropped her gaze and leaned back against the wall, while the little boy sobbed in an expanding pool of urine, drowning the lice unlucky enough to be in the way.

  “She’s right,” Devon said to Mr. Leoni. “Support of the board or not, the public’s going to eat you alive for this.”

  His chest puffed even harder. “You let me worry about the taxpayers. And Doctor Romero.”

  In other words, Dr. Banerjee already gave his blessing, and the taxpayers will never find out.

  Ani tried not to scream in frustration around her bite guard, and drool dribbled down her chin onto her shirt. Standing still was the hardest thing she’d ever done, but Mr. Benson hadn’t holstered his pistol, and his finger remained next to the trigger.

  They cleaned up the boy as best they could and sent the janitor for a mop bucket, then herded the dead back into their room. Unfettered, they sat back down and looked at Mr. Foster.

  �
�So,” Sam said, “what’s next? Got a vermin problem in the basement?”

  Mr. Foster giggled. “Look, I didn’t have anything to do with that.”

  “You could have said, ‘no,’” Sam retorted.

  He threw up his hands. “I don’t have tenure. They can fire me any time they want to. And you know what? Even with the differential I don’t get paid enough to put up with shit from a stuck-up corpse.”

  Ani’s jaw dropped, but Sam just smiled.

  Devon did a slow clap. “Look at Mr. F, finally showing some cojones.”

  He grimaced and affixed his gaze on his feet. “I...I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that, and I apologize.”

  Miss Pulver jumped when Teah called her name. “What?”

  “Sam needs a DASA form.” Even Teah’s smirk looked sad. “She’s being bullied.”

  “Enough.” Mr. Foster held up his hand. “One more word and I’m going to—”

  “—what?” Devon slammed her hands onto her desk, and Foster’s bluster crumbled. “Report us to Ani’s mom? Tell Mr. Clark to incinerate us? C’mon, Mr. F, you’ve got nothing and you know it, so why don’t you tuck those testes back in where they belong and help the retards with their history?” She jerked a thumb at Kyle, Mike, Lydia, and Teah.

  Kyle jerked half to his feet and slammed back down in his chair, brought up short by his chains. “Fuck you, Devon.”

  She blew him a kiss. “In your dreams.”

  Ani put her hand on Devon’s shoulder, drawing her attention. “Give it up, would you? This sucks enough as is.”

  Sam growled but sat back. She muttered something about louse control and human dignity, and Ani agreed even with the words she didn’t hear. The room back to relative calm, she looked down at her most recent attempt at her English assignment.

  In purple crayon, the paper read, “O’er.”

  Chapter

  21

  The lights came on, and Ani sighed. The action sent a gush of freezing liquid out of her mouth, and the thick, syrupy liquid swirled chips of ice in front of her eyes. The dull thrum of the lid disengaging was as familiar to Ani as her own artificial heartbeat, itself a subterfuge she no longer needed but they hadn’t bothered to remove.